Cisco Secure Workload vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks comparison

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3,237 views|2,153 comparisons
100% willing to recommend
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25,703 views|14,353 comparisons
97% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Workload and Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed Cisco Secure Workload vs. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks Report (Updated: March 2024).
767,847 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The solution offers 100% telemetry coverage. The telemetry you collect is not sampled, it's not intermittent. It's complete. You see everything in it, including full visibility of all activities on your endpoints and in your network.""By using Tetration insight, we are able to get the latency on our level accounts and we can determine whatever the issue is with the application latency itself.""The most valuable feature is micro-segmentation, which is the most important with respect to visibility.""A complete and powerful micro-segmentation solution.""Scalability is its most valuable feature.""The most valuable feature of this solution is security.""Generally speaking, Cisco support is considered one of the best in the networking products and stack.""The product offers great visibility into the network so we can enforce security measures."

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"I found the network queue sets useful. I also liked the Workload Protection Module, the vulnerability findings, and how the rule sets handle the vulnerabilities based on severity.""The most valuable features of Prisma Cloud are its cloud security posture management and cloud workload protection capabilities.""Prisma Cloud helped us with compliance. Most of my deployments have been greenfield, so I don't have a benchmark to compare how the security posture has improved. I've always used this from day zero of the configuration. However, I can say that the compliance checks for PCI, DSS, HIPAA, etc., made my life simpler. I don't need to look at each of these standards and compare the rules I have in place.""Comprehensive and valuable for providing security. It is scalable, its stability is impressive, and setting it up is straightforward.""Integrating with a CI/CD pipeline and incorporating a vulnerability assessment process are highly effective features, especially when combined with runtime protection.""The product provides very good network security.""The most valuable features are vulnerability monitoring, serverless access, container runtime features, and Defender.""Its ease of integration is valuable because we need to get the solution out of the door quickly, so speed and ease matter."

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Cons
"They should scale down the hardware a bit. The initial hardware investment is two million dollars so it's a price point problem. The issue with the price comes from the fact that you have to have it with enormous storage and enormous computes.""Secure Workload is a little complicated to use, and the dashboard isn't intuitive, so it takes a while to learn how to use it.""The multi-tenancy, redundancy, backup and restore functionalities, as well as the monitoring aspects of the solution, need improvement. The solution offers virtually no enterprise-grade possibility for monitoring.""I'd like to see better documentation for advanced features. The documentation is fairly basic. I would also like to see better integration with other applications.""The emailed notifications are either hard to find or they are not available. Search capabilities can be improved.""The product must be integrated with the cloud.""There is some overlap between Cisco Tetration and AppDynamics and I need to have a single pane of glass, rather than have to jump between different tools.""There was a controversy when Cisco reduced the amount of data they kept, and the solution became quite cost-intensive, which made its adoption challenging….Although they have modified it now, I preferred the previous version, and I wish all the functionality were back under the same product."

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"The deployment and onboarding are plug-and-play, but somewhat hard to handle in terms of integration with external operations tools. The product design isn't up to the current standard. I would recommend having higher standards in terms of integration with other tools, especially operationalized tools.""They should improve the user experience.""Based on my experience, the customization—especially the interface and some of the product identification components—is not as customizable as it could be. But it makes up for that with the fact that we can access the API and then build our own systems to read the data and then process and parse it and hand it to our teams.""We'd like to have more native integration with clouds and additional security checks in the future.""Prisma Cloud supports generating CSV files, but I would also like it to generate PDF files for reporting.""This solution is more AWS and Azure-centric. It needs to be more specific on the GCP side, which they are working on.""The access controls for our bank roles were not granular enough. We needed specific people to do particular actions, and we often had to give some people way too much access for them to be able to do what they needed in Prisma. They couldn't do their jobs if they didn't have that level of access, so other people had to do that part for them. It would help to have more granular role-based access controls.""One definite area for improvement is the auto-remediation or the CWP area. The second one is the RQL language. It is still not very flexible and does not cover a lot of use cases. The RQL language could be dramatically improved to add more options."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The pricing is a bit higher than we anticipated."
  • "The price is outrageous. If you have money to throw at the product, then do it."
  • "Pricing depends on the scope of the application and the features. Larger installations save more."
  • "It is not cheap and pricing may limit scalability."
  • "The price is based on how many computers you're going to install it on."
  • "The cost for the hardware is around 300k."
  • More Cisco Secure Workload Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The purchasing process was easy and quick. It is a very economical solution."
  • "Our licensing fees are $18,000 USD per year."
  • "One thing we're very pleased about is how the licensing model for Prisma is based on work resources. You buy a certain amount of work resources and then, as they enable new capabilities within Prisma, it just takes those work resource units and applies them to new features. This enables us to test and use the new features without having to go back and ask for and procure a whole new product, which could require going through weeks, and maybe months, of a procurement process."
  • "The pricing and the licensing are both very fair... The biggest advice I would give in terms of costs would be to try to understand what the growth is going to look like. That's really been our biggest struggle, that we don't have an idea of what our future growth is going to be on the platform. We go from X number of licenses to Y number of licenses without a plan on how we're going to get from A to B, and a lot of that comes as a bit of a surprise. It can make budgeting a real challenge for it."
  • "From my exposure so far, they have been really flexible on whatever your current state is, with a view to what the future state might be. There's no hard sell. They "get" the journey that you're on, and they're trying to help you embrace cloud security, governance, and compliance as you go."
  • "If a competitor came along and said, "We'll give you half the price," that doesn't necessarily mean that's the right answer, at all. We wouldn't necessarily entertain it that way. Does it do what we need it to do? Does it work with the things that we want it to work with? That is the important part for us. Pricing wasn't the big consideration it might be in some organizations. We spend millions on public cloud. In that context, it would not make sense to worry about the small price differences that you get between the products."
  • "The pricing and licensing are expensive compared to the other offerings that we considered."
  • "I don't know a better way to do it, but their licensing is a little confusing. That's due to the breadth of different types of technologies they are trying to cover. The way you license depends on where you're securing. When they were Twistlock it was a simple licensing scheme and you could tell what you were doing. Now that they've changed that scheme with Palo Alto, it is quite confusing. It's very difficult to predict what your costs are going to be as you try to expand coverage."
  • More Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:The product provides multiple-device integration.
    Top Answer:The product must be integrated with the cloud.
    Top Answer:Prisma Cloud helps support DevSecOps methodologies, making those responsibilities easier to manage.
    Top Answer:We like Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, since it offers us incredible visibility into our entire cloud system. We are able to easily see where our container vulnerabilities lie and and where cloud… more »
    Top Answer:Aqua Security is easy to use and very manageable. Its main focus is on Kubernetes and Docker. Security is a very valuable feature and their speed of integration is very good. The initial setup was… more »
    Ranking
    Views
    3,237
    Comparisons
    2,153
    Reviews
    1
    Average Words per Review
    235
    Rating
    7.0
    Views
    25,703
    Comparisons
    14,353
    Reviews
    53
    Average Words per Review
    1,120
    Rating
    8.4
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Cisco Tetration
    Palo Alto Networks Prisma Cloud, Prisma Public Cloud, RedLock Cloud 360, RedLock, Twistlock, Aporeto
    Learn More
    Overview

    Cisco Secure Workload is a cloud and data security solution that offers a zero-trust policy of keeping an organization’s application workloads safe and secure throughout the entire on-premise and cloud data center ecosystems.

    Cisco Secure Workload will consistently provide protection by discovering workload process anomalies, stopping threats immediately, minimizing the risk threat surface, and aborting any lateral movement.

    Today’s ecosystems are very elastic, and in the application-focused dynamic of today’s aggressive marketplace, Cisco Secure Workload delivers a robust security solution that works effectively with today’s most popular applications. The solution uniquely surrounds each and every workload to ensure organizations are able to keep their data, network, and applications safe and secure at all times. Cisco Secure Workload ensures that enterprise organizations can maintain secure applications by consistently building firewalls around every workload level throughout the entire ecosystem. The solution can manage applications that are deployed on containers, virtual machines, or bare-metal servers.

    Cisco Secure workload is able to meet an organization's busy needs and offers flexible options such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and on-premises options. Using the Secure Workload SaaS options, users receive all the benefits of Cisco Secure Workload protection without the hassle of having to deploy and maintain the platform on premises. Users are responsible for acquiring the necessary software licensing and deploying software agents. Using SaaS, Secure Workload runs in the cloud and is operated and maintained by Cisco. This option offers the ability to scale easily and is a popular choice for SaaS-first and SaaS-only clients. Many organizations find they get the best TCO and achieve the best productivity and profitability using the SaaS options.

    When choosing on-premises options, organizations choose between hardware-based appliance models (large or small form factors). Platform selection is dependent on scalability goals, the desired fidelity level of flow telemetry, and the actual number of workloads. When a user chooses to configure Cisco Secure Workload for a conversation-only flow telemetry for all workloads, each platform has the capability to scale up vertically twice the default platform scale. Additionally, with Secure Workload, it is possible for the platform to be scaled horizontally in order to satisfy the demands of extra large widely distributed enterprise environments using federation capabilities.

    Cisco Secure Workload also provides a robust disaster recovery (DR) tool, which helps to make it a complete, comprehensive solution. The DR allows for continuous restore and backup capabilities that enable users to quickly remediate operations and data to a standby cluster in the event of a drastic failure or disaster.

    Reviews from Real Users

    The solution offers 100% telemetry coverage. The telemetry you collect is not sampled, it's not intermittent. It's complete. You see everything in it, including full visibility of all activities on your endpoints and in your network. Other valuable features include vast support for annotations, flexible user applications, machine learning, automatic classification, and hierarchical policies.” - CTO at a tech vendor

    Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is a cloud security solution used for cloud security posture management, cloud workload protection, container security, and code security. It provides visibility, monitoring, and alerting for security issues in multi-cloud environments. 

    The solution is user-friendly, easy to set up, and integrates with SIEM for generating alerts and reports. Its most valuable features include security features, monitoring capabilities, reporting, compliance monitoring, vulnerability dashboard, data security features, and multi-cloud capabilities. Prisma Cloud has helped organizations by providing comprehensive protection, automating workflows, simplifying troubleshooting, and improving collaboration between SecOps and DevOps.

    Prisma Cloud Features

    Prisma Cloud offers comprehensive security coverage in all areas of the cloud development lifecycle:

    • Code security: Protect configurations, scan code before it enters production, and integrate with other tools.

    • Security posture management: Monitor posture, identify and remove threats, and provide compliance across public clouds.

    • Workload protection: Secure hosts and containers across the application lifecycle.

    • Network security: Gain network visibility and enforce micro segmentation.

    • Identity security: Enforce permissions and secure identities across clouds.

    Benefits of Prisma Cloud

    • Unified management: All users use the same dashboards built via shared onboarding, allowing cloud security to be addressed from a single agent framework.

    • High-speed onboarding: Multiple cloud accounts and users are onboarded within seconds, rapidly activating integrated security capabilities.

    • Multiple integration options: Prisma Cloud can integrate with widely used IDE, SCM, and CI/CD workflows early in development, enabling users to identify and fix vulnerabilities and compliance issues before they enter production. Prisma Cloud supports all major workflows, automation frameworks, and third-party tools.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Prisma Cloud stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its integration capabilities, as well as its visibility, which makes it very easy for users to get a full picture of the cloud environment.

    Alex J., an information security manager at Cobalt.io, writes, “Prisma Cloud has enabled us to take a very strong preventive approach to cloud security. One of the hardest things with cloud is getting visibility into workloads. With Prisma Cloud, you can go in and get that visibility, then set up policies to alert on risky behavior, e.g., if there are security groups or firewall ports open up. So, it is very helpful in preventing configuration errors in the cloud by having visibility. If there are issues, then you can find them and fix them.”

    Luke L., a cloud security specialist for a financial services firm, writes, “You can also integrate with Amazon Managed Services. You can also get a snapshot in time, whether that's over a 24-hour period, seven days, or a month, to determine what the estate might look like at a certain point in time and generate reports from that for vulnerability management forums.”

    Sample Customers
    ADP, University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC)
    Amgen, Genpact, Western Asset, Zipongo, Proofpoint, NerdWallet, Axfood, 21st Century Fox, Veeva Systems, Reinsurance Group of America
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Comms Service Provider44%
    Media Company11%
    Energy/Utilities Company11%
    Computer Software Company11%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company29%
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Government6%
    Insurance Company5%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company32%
    Manufacturing Company17%
    Financial Services Firm17%
    Healthcare Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company14%
    Educational Organization13%
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business29%
    Midsize Enterprise21%
    Large Enterprise50%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise70%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business29%
    Midsize Enterprise19%
    Large Enterprise52%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise22%
    Large Enterprise61%
    Buyer's Guide
    Cisco Secure Workload vs. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Secure Workload vs. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    767,847 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Cisco Secure Workload is ranked 20th in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) with 13 reviews while Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is ranked 1st in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) with 81 reviews. Cisco Secure Workload is rated 8.4, while Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Cisco Secure Workload writes "A solution that provides good technical support but its high cost makes it challenging for users to adopt it". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks writes "The dashboard is very user-friendly and can be used to generate custom RQL based on user requirements". Cisco Secure Workload is most compared with Illumio, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation, VMware NSX, Cisco ACI and Cisco ISE (Identity Services Engine), whereas Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is most compared with Wiz, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Aqua Cloud Security Platform, AWS Security Hub and CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security. See our Cisco Secure Workload vs. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks report.

    See our list of best Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) vendors.

    We monitor all Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.